September, Pt. 2
One of the neatest things about school starting up has been the daily lunch experience. To preface this you’ll need to understand that all the way through high school Japanese students are grouped into classrooms each school year, and the teachers are the ones who move from class to class depending on the period (obviously for things like P.E. and music the kids move rooms but it’s still done as a class). The same group of kids are together in each class for the whole year. Since the classroom is theirs, they also eat lunch there and clean it up at the end of the day every day. Therefore, a cafeteria is nowhere to be seen at your normal Japanese school. So does everyone bring their lunch from home? No. Through some arcane trickery, the mystery of which I’m yet to unravel, there is a uniform school lunch you can opt into throughout the school, and because I don’t have a homeroom I always come back to the staff room at lunch time with a plate of food waiting at my desk as well. Well, except for the days I don’t have a class the period before, then the nice lunch lady hands it to me and sometimes we chat for a bit. You’d expect this food situation to result in some Lunchables style slop being served because of the logistical nightmare but it is always fresh and decently healthy, as well as traditionally Japanese, usually. From my understanding the schools use locally grown food because this is a big farming area. I also really enjoy the chances I have to eat a more “home-style” Japanese meal that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. That being said, today’s lunch was a really nice Chinese meal, and the carbonara they served a couple weeks ago was honestly not half bad, either.
These are some typical school lunches, divided into rice (occasionally bread), soup, and the main dish.
This is the October menu at the middle school, complete with ingredients and health information.
Another thing about lunch at the middle school are the announcements made over the school’s P.A. system. It starts halfway through the break with a cheerful little jingle that fades into the slightly nervous voice of the first-year broadcasting club’s representative of the day. They describe the day’s meal and make some other relevant announcements about the day or upcoming events. My predecessor (yeah, still don’t like this word) told me that sometimes they’ll announce whose family farm the parts of the meal came from. However, because of the middle school mumbling and not-so-state-of-the-art P.A. system, as well as the fact that I don’t pay much attention to the announcements’ contents because I’m too busy shoveling in mouthfuls of rice, I haven’t been able to make anything like that out yet. Once the announcement ends they play a few songs over the speakers for the rest of the break. I always look forward to this part because they really play whatever they want. Sometimes it’s typical J-pop or K-pop, but I’ve heard everything from Bach to vocaloid to “Tokyo Drift” from the Fast and Furious movie. I couldn’t help but let out a stunned chuckle when I heard the first bell from that one, earning me some concerned glances from the others in the staff room. Knowing full well that my surreal feelings about hearing that song, which is also kind of an inside joke with my California friends, during lunch time over a school’s P.A. system in Japan wouldn’t translate at all I resigned myself to being the weirdo. Any attempt at an explanation would do nothing but cement that feeling I’m sure.
Unfortunately, I’ve written so much about food that I’ve become hungry for dinner, so I think I’ll go get some curry. I’ll give these posts a new working title because I haven’t really written much about settling in. I’ll be back soon!